NavyFCO

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a few variations ....

Oooooohh.... Prettty metal!!!!

But have you researched them yet???

Dave, I think here is some kind of "apples" and "oranges" mixed together. Neither me nor other forum members didn't even mention about splitting any group for taking rare variation out of it. The only idea was that we like variations and this is it. If I find interesting variation within a group I would simply keep the whole thing. The story that you told us is awful and this person was quite stupid to break a group apart. But do not judge about Russian collectors because of that case. I know many of them and believe me that most of them are very interested in "historical" part of the award. It's kind of sad to hear from you this opinion about collectors from former USSR.

Andrew:

Here's the rather interesting "rest of the story" regarding the split group. I was able to e-mail the seller and convince him to keep the medals with it, even offering him the value of the jubilee medals just to keep the group together. He agreed to do that. You're probably quite curious as to who this "evil" person could have been... All I am going to say is that you and I both know him, and ironically, I now consider him one of my friends! Now isn't that an odd twist???

I did not mean to sound like I was judging all Russian collectors. I am certain that there are many out there who appreciate the history of the groups as much as I do, especially considering that most - if not all - have close family connections with the veterans of the War. Yet at the same time, when I was living in Russia between 1992 and 1996, and when I was bringing groups over in large quantity during the 1999-2002 time period, I would be told by my contacts that often they would have to reassemble groups, or that missing pieces were gone because one person wanted the one rare item out of the group. (Of course, sometimes it made it very nice... eliminate a Suvorov 2nd from an otherwise "plain" group and you have a neat group for considerably less money! ) I also saw a number of groups get split on the markets in Moscow while I lived there. Of course, at the time, no one really cared all too much about all the documents, photos, etc.... Sad, but true.

The other side is that the only times I have seen my research "dissapear" from a group is when it went over to Russia and then came back to the US (or in one case, never came back.) In one case, the award had what my researcher considered to be "the best combat citation he had ever read" with it, yet when it came back up for sale after being in Russia, the research was 100% missing. Could it have gotten lost? Or went missing? Possibly, but in the one case where I bought the research back from the group, the new buyer (a collector in Russia) simply didn't want it. A bad apple? I am certain. And I am just as certain that you could substitute "American" or "Canadian" or "German" collector for the "Russian" in the above story and have it apply just as much.

At the same time, perhaps I just ran into some bad apples, which is always the case in every hobby!

Anyway, this has been a good thread and has brought up some good points on both sides of the fence. I, for one, didn't think about the need for finding all the subvariations to identify fakes, but in reality, that's the only way to do it and do it right. And thanks to everyone for being good "gentlemen" on what would probably have evolved into a brawl on any lesser forum.

Dave

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I try to get as many variations together of ORB?s and OPW 2nd classes and Red Stars...

You see, some people might see only variations of medals in this photo that Gerd posted. For me, I see eight stories... eight different stories of eight different people who sacrificed for their country and families.

Any one of these medals could have belonged to a Regimental Commander who led his men in a charge into the German guns, or there could be a medal to an air ace, for shooting down his fifth kill. Or perhaps, there is a medal there to a man who provided fuel and supplies to the frontline, and being solely responsible for the furthering of a division or army as they advanced to Berlin. Or perhaps there could simply be a long-service award there to a man who served in an unremarkable job for 20 years....but suffered through four years of death and destruction, with many of those close to him - and perhaps even his own family - slaughtered by the invading Germans.

To a person who purely collects variations, these are simply eight different pieces of metal, with some pretty enamel on them. For what they are worth to them, they could walk up to a veteran, remove this peice of metal from the veteran's chest, look the veteran in the eye and tell him: "I don't care at all who you were or what you did in the War. I only care about this to fill a gap in my collection."

I can tell you with most certainly that, if someone did that to me 60 years from now, when I am proudly wearing the medals that I have earned on my chest, my last moments of life on earth would be summoning all of what was left of my 90 year old strength and wrapping my cold fingers around that person's throat....and squeezing.

Like I said in my last post, I know I am in the minority when it comes to the reasons for collecting Soviet awards, and that the majority of collectors are those people who simply want that next variation..... And now you know why I am rather sensitive about the topic.

Dave

Guys:

Sorry for seeming a bit outspoken by this, but one of my few "buttons" that can be pushed in the Soviet collecting world is the tendency for some folks to find every variation possible and charge excessive amounts for those variations. I am aware that most Soviet awards collectors (especially when considering those in Russia) are actually more "variation" than "historical" collectors, so I do have to appreciate the position of the majority, even if I cannot completely understand it myself.

Part of this sensitivity comes from a really neat little group I once sold that had a nice photo of the recipient and his wife, a couple orders, and then the fellow's jubilee medals with all documents. I researched the group and it had nice combat citations.

I sold the group and not more than two weeks later I saw the buyer list all of the jubilee medals and documents up on eBay! I quickly e-mailed the seller who promptly told me that he wasn't interested in any part of the group other than one of the orders that was a rare subvariation, and that he could really care less about anything else with the group!

I was floored! For all these years, the group had been kept together, and then, just because someone wanted to fill a blank hole in their collection, they decide to split the group - and to what value? Maybe $20 for the jubliee medals with documents? How hard would it have been to have simply put those in a ziploc bag and kept those with the group???

I started collecting Soviet awards because I thought they were neat looking and I really appreciated the suffering the people of the USSR faced for many years. By owning the awards it was my way to connect myself and in a physical sense understand what they went through. Thus, when we started researching groups in about 1996/7, that fit my collecting interests perfectly - I could find out EXACTLY who the person was who earned the award and what they did for it. To me, that became the joy of collecting Soviet awards, far and above that of German or Mongolian awards - which are "pretty", but are all too often untraceable to exactly who the recipient was and the sacrifices they made to earn that award.

So to me, I can understand the position of the person who collect variations, though as I said above, I'm not one of them. It does sadden me greatly to see groups get split as I saw that one get split because of someone wanting a rare variation to fill a hole in their collection. That sort of thing makes me wonder if a person like that might not be better at collecting something like bottlecaps, or perhaps baseball cards, that do not serve as reminders of people's sacrifice in war, and can fulfill a person's need to collect every different style and type.

That's just my opinion, and I know that it isn't shared by many people reading this. We're all different, and that's okay.

Thanks for reading.

Dave

Part of my fear would be the irrationality that might well be followed, going along the lines of the thinking of Russian customs. If you've ever had a "bad" run in with them, you know what I mean. 10 years ago, some family came to visit me in Russia. I sent home with them a very large amount of militaria (both German and Soviet) that I had purchased over several months of hitting the flea markets. Unfortunately, the customs agent at the airport saw a flag top (from the early 1920s) in the luggage and wanted to look at it. While pulling it out, they found a single medal..... and that was it! The customs agents proceeded to dig through all of the luggage, pulling out every single medal that they could find, from pre-WW2 through 1988 jubilees! Ironically, I had a good amount of really nice WW2 general officer uniforms in the luggage as well.... No, they weren't interested in that (even though it was more valuable than the medals) they were just interested in the medals only because of their "cultural" value.

Why do I tell this story? The worst case scenario could become a "blind" witch hunt. A HSU group, whether it was in a museum or not, definately does represent some of the "cultural heritage" of the country, and could legitimately be confiscated, either under the guise that it COULD have been from a museum (unless you can prove otherwise, and how many people can???) or that it was illegal to export the medals anyway under their laws, so therefore the medals are illegally owned regardless.

Will this ever happen? Probably not. However, any way you cut it the Russians have laws on the books forbidding the sale and export of these medals, therefore we all technically have "illegal" property in our collections that we technically shouldn't be owning.

Interesting to at least think about, eh?

Dave

So here's a question for you... What if Putin goes and puts out a global recall on all items from Russian museums? He could very easily say that anything from a Russian museum was "stolen state property" and claim ownership of anything that was in a museum - even if those items reside in a collection outside Russia. I know that most of us have "former museum items" (though most items are from museums in the Republics) and who would stop their items from being confiscated at shows and the like, especially if Putin's claim on the "restoral of Russian cultural items" was backed up with a partnership with Interpol and the FBI (which would be very reasonable, IMO.)

For anyone that thinks that couldn't possibly happen, what do you think the US (or Britain) would do if items were stolen out of our national museums and sold to collectors in Russia? It's obvious that our security agencies would do everything possible to recover the stolen items, no matter where they ended up (they've done it before.) Why wouldn't the Russians do the same thing???

Dave

Dan-

I know this doesn't help you, but I can barely tell the difference between the two... I think the "new variation" is just a way to charge more for a common medal. I can remember back when, for example, "an OGPW1 is an OGPW1." It was either hanging or not. If was on a hanger it was one price, if it wasn't, it was another. Nowadays you have the "Variation such-and-such Type such-and-such Subtype such-and-such with the mintmark pressed in the XX o'clock position with slight curvature of the "M" on Monetni that as made with a press operating at XX psi versus the standard XX psi with the arms of the star at the XX and XX positions instead of the common XX position... Therefore it's worth TEN MILLION DOLLARS."

Sorry to sound crass, but who cares?

Or maybe I've been around just too darn long to see charging different prices on "rare" variations that were made because an employee at the Mint came in with a hangover on the day that they were made...

Dave

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Here's a group I used to own to an opera singer and "Honored Artist of the RSFSR".....

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But imho a scanner usualy produces better results

I don't disagree, though sometimes you can capture details from other angles that the scanner cannot get. As you have probably seen from my website, I'm pretty adept at scanner usage. At the same time, if you're going to buy a good digital camera anyway, a light box isn't a bad thing to think about buying as - if you had the camera anyway - it's probably overall cheaper than the scanner. And besides, ever tried getting your kids to take portraits in a scanner? This is what my youngest daughter thought about having a portait taken by my scanner.....

Not sure what you mean by a "light box", could it be something like this?

Hi Dolf-

I call it a "light box" though some others call it a "light tent". Here's an article about the one I purchased:

http://www.cameratown.com/news/news.cfm/hurl/id%7C1927

In this post is also a photo of it, from the same article.

Dave

In keeping with the "soviet" theme of the forum, here's a shot with my old camera of a Nevsky in my lightbox...

This is the sort of photo that you can take in a light box with decent lighting...

Is this an better

The problem that you're having is the fact that you are relying upon the flash for the light source. That's the reason there are some bright and dark spots on the award. There are several ways of getting around this. One is to buy a fabric "light box" with light, from someplace like eBay. I own a Smith-Victor light box that was a "buy it now" (with lights and all) for $95. on eBay. It works great.

The second option is to buy just the "box" only, and use that outside. That way, you'll use the bright sunlight, filtered through the white fabric of the box to make even lighting. The boxes run around $40 on eBay, or if you're creative, you can fairly easily make your own (I'm just not handy enough for that!)

The third option is to photograph the medals outside on a cloudy (overcast) day. From my experience, this is most of the days in "sunny" England, so you might be in luck there (bad to wait for a cloudy day in say, the California desert!) The clouds esentially serve as a "whole world" (at least your world) lightbox, breaking the direct rays of the sun into smaller, more even amounts.

If possible, you should also open your exposure settings on the camera in order to compensate for a lack of flash, and thus take in as much sunlight as possible.

Hope that helps!

Dave